


February

by negligibleCatharsis



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, Coping, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-23
Updated: 2011-10-23
Packaged: 2017-10-24 21:49:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/268248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/negligibleCatharsis/pseuds/negligibleCatharsis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The physical toll that possession by vengeful Eldritch gods has on the body of a thirteen-year-old girl is much, much higher than Rose Lalonde ever anticipated.</p>
            </blockquote>





	February

**Author's Note:**

> ###### Very loosely based off of [this](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDgOc3gMtFk) song.

Her vocal chords had snapped like chintzy rubber bands stretched across a guitar in a sad attempt to replace the metal strings. Speaking an Elder language required more strength of the throat than a quiet girl like Rose had, much more, and after all was said and done, English came with great difficulty. The words that had once flowed so beautifully under her command then sat in viscous, festering puddles, heavy and unfamiliar on her tongue. Nothing sounded as she intended it to.

Her wardrobe became a funeral parlor. Every item of clothing was pitch black, as if someone had carelessly spilled ink across her attire. The black enveloped her, swallowing everything that had previously been Rose Lalonde, and vomiting up pallid, ashen skin and frigid white hair.

Sharp violet irises struck out from between high cheekbones and pale, thin eyebrows. A single glance could cut through bone. Her mouth was a small, perfect line; her lips, tight and pinched. If more than three hundred calories passed through those lips without reemerging, it was a good day.

Most of her days were bad days. It was not long before her already bony structure became further emaciated, and the other children began to worry that she would become nothing more than pale skin stretched thin over brittle bones. Jade and John spent hours in the kitchen, researching and creating elaborate, rich dishes that could set the harshest of food critics to salivating uncontrollably. She vomited up every single one within an hour of having consumed it, and Dave began to wonder whether she was trying to keep food down at all.

Fortunately, she was able to keep peace between her stomach and liquids, and thus Rose was sustained for a time on nothing more than tea and water, with the occasional soda cracker after a mug of Irish Breakfast.

It was during one of her more violent shaking fits, when Dave moved to grab her hand, that he noticed her skin was ice cold. And though it caused her to shiver even more brutally, he raised her hand to his lips to breathe on it as he gently rubbed it, trying to create some sort of friction, some sort of warmth. Anything to melt the winter that had become his sister. By the time her fit died down, her touch was still sub-zero, but with her fingers woven tightly into his, he found it all too easy to pretend as though he was making some sort of progress in raising her body temperature.

When the air outside was cooler than Rose’s now-hoary skin and flurries that rivaled the whiteness of her hair fell from the grey heavens above, he slid a thick coat around her shoulders and draped an all-too-familiar pink scarf atop it, and took her hand in his. He led her outside, and across the grounds of her home towards the forest. They passed Jasper’s tomb in silence, snow crunching and squealing beneath boots and echoing eerily through the hush that only the kiss of winter could bring.

The flower garden had once been her favourite place to be, a fact he recalled only due to her incessant allusions to floral life throughout the summer of 2002, so Dave gently pulled her towards the small, fenced area buried beneath a thick blanket of snow. Fingers crossed, he hoped against hope that, out of all the hibernating floral life, one flower, just one, would be brave enough to stick its head out from under the white shroud. His fingers were not crossed in vain, for there, rising above the snow and contrasting blinding white with soft lilac, was a tightly-closed flower. He squeezed Rose’s hand and pointed to it.

Check it out, he said. That’s a crocus.  
Dave. Her hand tightened around his. What’s a crocus?  
It’s a flower.  
She dropped his hand, turned away from him and away from the grave of the summertime flowers.  
What’s a flower?

He took her hand back in his, squeezed it, and mumbled something that she did not hear.

That evening, after Rose had showered, Dave discovered clumps of white hair clinging to the shower walls, and viscous black sludge oozed lazily down towards the drain from the now-oily bar of soap. Silently, he cleaned up every strand of hair, placed a new bar of soap on the shelf, and took a long, scalding shower. The cycle of cleaning and saying nothing continued for a week- until he found bright red blood mixing with the oily swill on the walls. He cleaned it as patiently as ever, but spoke to Jade the next morning, asking her to help Rose shower lest he do it himself. She smiled, agreed, and finished her bowl of cornflakes.

She emerged from the bathroom that evening covered in scratches and bleeding gently from a cut under her eye. Dave helped bandage her up, and apologized twice for asking her to do what should have been his job in the first place. She just smiled and told him he would probably want to clip Rose’s nails first.

Water, he reasoned, was a kind of trigger to her. Maybe it reminded her of octopi, which reminded her of tentacles, which reminded her of Horrorterrors. Maybe it was reminiscent of the aqueous, heavy burden that had nagged at her conscience as her body played the part of puppet to her cataclysmic overlords. Whatever the reason, Adam’s ale caused her to lash out at the nearest living thing, which had first been herself, and later, Jade. The ten minutes he spent clipping and filing Rose’s nails were more for their protection than his.

She thrashed wildly, splashing the water in the bathtub onto the walls and ceiling, and Dave patiently knelt and held her hand until she curled into a ball and clenched her hands into fists until her knuckles turned white. It must have been her determination that brought the hazy cloud of red blossoming wider and wider by her knees, followed by a snaking line of the black, oily substance that had first appeared on the shower walls. He plunged his hand into the tepid bathwater- hadn’t it been scaldingly hot when he drew it up?- and seized her wrist, dragging her nearest hand to the surface and prying open her fist. Her palm was covered in crescent-shaped scars, and he mentally kicked himself for not noticing earlier. In the silence of the bathroom, a drop of water fell from the faucet with a gentle ‘plip’, and she dug her dull, rounded nails into his knuckles so hard he yelped, but she did not unclench her hand from his for the remainder of the bath. It was not until the last of the water had swirled away down the drain with a sympathetic gurgle that she released his hand, smeared with blood and black, and whispered an apology for the crescent-shaped lacerations that would later scar and serve as a permanent reminder of what the game had done to her.

She dried off by herself, and he cleaned up the mess on the floor where he had bled on the white-crème tiles. He found her curled up under her covers, staring blankly out the window, looking but not seeing. He stood in her doorway, face as blank as ever, simply watching her. Outside, the snow fell heavily from the sky, painting the world with yet more white.

Dave.  
Rose.  
 _Dave._  
Rocky.

She nearly smiled at that one, and he invited himself into her room. There’s a chair from her dining room where John had sat with her earlier that day, talking about their impending marriage as if the shitty shipping chart of a dead alien still meant anything. He knew it didn’t, she knew it didn’t, but it distracted from the pain and hell of her everyday existence, so she listened and he spoke and no one said a word against it. Now Dave sat in the chair, looking out the frosty windowpanes with her, out at the Lalonde house grounds that were being tucked in for the evening by Nature’s careful, thorough hand. They watched the flakes float lazily down for hours without exchanging a word, and when Rose rolled over onto her back and closed her eyes, Dave leaned over to take her hand, and she wound her fingers between his. The shock of cold on the delicate flesh between his digits was unpleasant, but he only held her hand tighter.

Rose slept peacefully for the first time in weeks, and never let go of his hand. He continued to watch the snow fall until the entirety of the forest was lit blood-red by the rising sun and the snow ceased to fall. Finally, Dave Strider looked down at the grey, emaciated girl asleep before him, the light of the morning sun casting a strange glow on her face, giving her the appearance of one who had just been beaten violently with a blunt, heavy object. He swept a strand of white hair away from her mouth, and brushed his thumb over her knuckles. Dawn had broken, but Rose had not woken up. Not yet.

She was not out of the dark, nor could she see the light at the end of the tunnel, but she was heading in the right direction, and he would be there to help her along the way until Rose Lalonde could once more open her eyes and stand in the sunlight with him.


End file.
